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LinuxWatch writes "'It's been long promised, but there it is now,' began Linux creator Linus Torvalds, announcing the 2.6.25 Linux kernel. He continued, 'special thanks to Ingo who found and fixed a nasty-looking regression that turned out to not be a regression at all, but an old bug that just had not been triggering as reliably before. That said, that was just the last particular regression fix I was holding things up for, and it's not like there weren't a lot of other fixes too, they just didn't end up being the final things that triggered my particular worries.' There were numerous changes in this revision of the OS. The origins of some of those fixes is detailed in Heise's brief history of this kernel update."

That's not really a Linux thing - look at Debian, you've got two kernels there and effectively the same userspace. Now, if you say you want everyone to stop using X, you'd probably need to implement some sort of direct rendering on the next level up, which is going to be your toolkit stuff (GDK/Cairo/GTK+ or the QT equiv, for most apps) You have now just bisected your GUI application compatibility.

I'm not sure that X11 is so lacking anymore - the recent versions have been making some nice improvements, and it's still the only thing with that high of compatibility.

I'm no proponent of the GP, but there *is* a 'third way', if you will - expand the X-library so that a) local connections don't necessarily use a protocol over a pipe, but make function-calls instead, and b) implement widgets in the X-client library much more detailed than the current window- and image-primitives; say a basic set of menu-bar, scrollbar, list, tabs etc. All pluggable in the X-server, of course, so that everybody can still 'skin' their desktop according to their taste. c) Do away - finally - with the silly ways that cut-n-paste and drag-n-drop, in short, IPC and buffers, have been implemented in X. Invent a serious way to communicate between X clients, not a tag-along.

Has anyone noticed the forced CIFS migration warning yet? Do you have some links on how to do that? I mean just the obvious two things of being able to mount a remote windows share (preferably without being root), and setting up CUPS for printing to a windows-shared printer. All I see on Google are technical articles about the protocol.

You have just articulated the major perceptual obstacle to Linux developers' ability to grasp the desktop. They refuse to draw a neat line between "system" and "applications" and then promote and support that set of interfaces, so there is no consistent platform that facilitates independent distribution of applications to end-users.

Pretty much all the alternatives listed are dead or dying, so pot kettle black on the amount of research done.

That's precisely the point. In a competitive environment, X Windows has won out. Why? Because it's extremely hard to write anything as good, and even harder to write anything sufficiently better to persuade any significant number of users to switch.